Abstract
Durable hydrophobic materials have attracted considerable interest in the last century. Currently, the most popular strategy to achieve hydrophobic coating durability is through the combination of a perfluoro-compound with a mechanically robust matrix to form a composite for coating protection. The matrix structure is typically large (thicker than 10 μm), difficult to scale to arbitrary materials, and incompatible with applications requiring nanoscale thickness such as heat transfer, water harvesting, and desalination. Here, we demonstrate durable hydrophobicity and superhydrophobicity with nanoscale-thick, perfluorinated compound-free polydimethylsiloxane vitrimers that are self-healing due to the exchange of network strands. The polydimethylsiloxane vitrimer thin film maintains excellent hydrophobicity and optical transparency after scratching, cutting, and indenting. We show that the polydimethylsiloxane vitrimer thin film can be deposited through scalable dip-coating on a variety of substrates. In contrast to previous work achieving thick durable hydrophobic coatings by passively stacking protective structures, this work presents a pathway to achieving ultra-thin (thinner than 100 nm) durable hydrophobic films.
Highlights
Durable hydrophobic materials have attracted considerable interest in the last century
The boric acid was dissolved in isopropanol (Sigma Aldrich, 99%) in a ratio of 0.1 g·mol−1 B(OH)[3] to 2.5 mL of isopropyl alcohol (IPA) by sonication at room temperature for 30 mins
The B(OH)3 + IPA solution was added to PDMS in a 20 mL vial which was heated at 75 °C and stirred at 250 rpm for 30 mins
Summary
Durable hydrophobic materials have attracted considerable interest in the last century. The most popular strategy to achieve hydrophobic coating durability is through the combination of a perfluoro-compound with a mechanically robust matrix to form a composite for coating protection. The matrix structure is typically large (thicker than 10 μm), difficult to scale to arbitrary materials, and incompatible with applications requiring nanoscale thickness such as heat transfer, water harvesting, and desalination. We demonstrate durable hydrophobicity and superhydrophobicity with nanoscale-thick, perfluorinated compound-free polydimethylsiloxane vitrimers that are self-healing due to the exchange of network strands. A promising path is to develop scalable, self-healing thin coatings (h < 100 nm) which do not necessarily need the same hardness or elastic modulus as inorganic materials but instead can enhance coating durability by actively repairing defects. Among several available material designs for self-healing coatings, vitrimers and dynamic networks are promising for scalable thin film (h < 100 nm) synthesis. Dynamic covalent polymer networks with associative or network conserving bonds, have been demonstrated to exhibit self-healing abilities in addition to reprocessability[28,29,30,31]
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